An automation is a small job you describe once in plain English, name, and then run whenever you want — by hand, from a bullet, or on a repeat that keeps going while you are away.
The shape is always the same three lines: what it reads, what it does, and where it writes.
Press ⌘K, type /auto, and describe the outcome you want:
/auto Check the current temperature in Healdsburg, California and report the reading
The AI designs it and gives it a short name — Healdsburg Temperature — with your full request kept underneath as the description. You land on its recipe card.
You can also turn an Ask answer into an automation: ask your question in the Ask lens, then choose Save as automation under the answer.
Every automation is three editable lines. Click Edit on any of them and it opens underneath, so you can see the rest of the recipe while you change one part of it. Changes save as you make them — there is no Save button.
Reads — what it pulls from your vault before thinking. Tags, a bullet and its children, recent notes, a type of block. Each one narrows the result, and a live count tells you how many bullets match before you commit. Leave it empty and the automation runs on its instruction alone, which is also what lets it run in the background (see below).
Does — the instruction, in plain English. There is a toggle here for Look it up on the web, which you want for anything current: prices, news, releases. Without it the answer comes from what the model already knew, which can be badly out of date and sounds just as confident. Weather is the exception — Thoute reads a live weather feed for that, so leave web search off for weather automations.
Writes — where the result lands:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Under the block that calls it | Results become new lines beneath whichever bullet you ran it from — a journal day, the Library, anywhere. One line per run, so they build up. |
| Add to the Library | Each run lands as a document in the Library outline. |
| Today's journal | Each run adds a document to today's entry. |
| Preview only | Shows you the result on the card. Writes nothing. |
Test run does exactly what it says: it runs the automation and shows you the result without writing anything anywhere. Use it while you are still shaping the instruction.
Automations live under More → Automations, listed down the left with their recipe on the right. Pin it to the lens strip if you use it often. From there you can also Duplicate one to make a variant without rebuilding it.
An automation becomes useful when you can call it from wherever the answer belongs.
On any line, type /run — or open the line's ••• menu and choose Run an automation — and pick one. If the line was blank it takes the automation's name, so you get a labelled bullet rather than an anonymous one.
Results land as children of that line, newest at the bottom, each stamped with the time it ran:
• Healdsburg Temperature ⟳ every 1h · 3/12 · next 14:05
↳ 13:05 — 68°F, clear
↳ 12:05 — 67°F, clear
↳ 11:05 — 65°F, partly cloudy
The small marker on the right shows what the automation is doing — running, scheduled, finished, or why it stopped. Click it for Run now, Schedule, and Remove. Removing the automation leaves the lines it already wrote; they are your notes now.
Because the destination is the calling bullet, one automation serves many of them. The same "check a temperature" recipe can sit under a Healdsburg bullet and an Iowa City bullet at once.
Click the marker on a calling bullet and choose Schedule. Pick how often, and when it should stop.
An end condition is required. Every automation that searches the web spends one of your monthly web searches per run, so before you start one Thoute tells you exactly what it will cost:
12 runs · 12 of your remaining 84 web searches this month.
The shortest repeat is 15 minutes, and one schedule can run at most 200 times. The schedule lives on the bullet, not on the automation, so the same recipe can run hourly under one line and weekly under another.
Scheduled automations need a paid plan.
This is the part worth understanding, because it splits automations into two kinds.
If your automation reads nothing from your vault — checking a temperature, watching a price, following a public feed — it runs on our servers on schedule, with Thoute closed. Ask for a reading every hour for twelve hours, shut your laptop, and the next time you open Thoute you will find twelve readings genuinely taken an hour apart, sitting under the bullet you started from.
If it reads your notes — summarising your week, pulling from a tag — it can only run while Thoute is open. Our servers hold no key to your vault and cannot read it, so there is nothing there to run. A run that comes due while the app is closed happens the next time you open it. The app tells you which kind you have before you schedule it, and the recipe card says "Reads: Nothing" for the first kind.
A background schedule stops on its own and tells you why: when your web searches run out for the month (and starts again when they reset), when Cloud AI is switched off for the vault, and when the bullet it was writing to is deleted.
To run with every client closed, a background automation stores two things on our servers unencrypted: its name and its one instruction, so the server can run it without your key; and each result, until your app collects it and writes it into your notes encrypted like everything else. Uncollected results are deleted after 30 days.
Nothing from your vault is sent — that is exactly what makes an automation eligible to run there in the first place. This is a deliberate, narrow exception to the zero-knowledge model, the same shape as publishing a page to the web: it happens only for the automation you scheduled, only after you confirm it, and stopping the schedule removes it. Automations you never schedule stay entirely on your device. Privacy has the full picture.
Automations that look things up read about ten sources and say where the answer came from. Figures carry the time they were observed, because a search result is only as fresh as the last time that page was crawled:
68°F according to AccuWeather, observed at 10:50. Other sources report 51°F to 72°F.
That is deliberate. A number quoted confidently from one stale page is worse than a range that shows its work. Weather is read from a live feed instead, so it reports an actual observation timestamped to the minute — see Ask AI for where outside answers come from.